


Ghosts

by lateralus112358



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Pseudo victorian era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:54:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24464542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lateralus112358/pseuds/lateralus112358
Summary: Strange housefellows.
Relationships: Root | Samantha Groves/Sameen Shaw
Comments: 16
Kudos: 58





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends, this is a story I feel like I've been working on forever. And by 'working on' I mean 'writing the first few lines years ago and then never doing any more work on it until recently.' Right now I'm planning for five chapters, but it may end up with more or less depending on how things pan out. Hope you like it.

The first set of knocks meet with no reply. Nor do the ones that follow, the intensity increasing and the interim between each set decreasing, until a nonstop barrage of fury beats against the large wooden door, ringing out into the mildly unkempt courtyard, and further out towards the mass of trees that enwrap the erratically constructed, sprawling estate. Rage unabated, but stamina somewhat depleted, the woman turns away from the door, and with fists still clenched but finding no productive cause on which to use them, she sits down on the stone steps to which the patchily paved path of the estate courtyard had delivered her. The edges of the steps are worn and cracked, little bits crumbling away into nothingness. The sun had been high in the sky as the woman had walked down the long dirt road leading to the estate, lugging behind her the multiple suitcases that now sit beside her on the dilapidated steps. Now the last bits of light are creeping behind the trees that wander vaguely around the building, their lengthening shadows making them look as if they’re creeping closer. 

Faintly outlined against the darkening sky, a figure moves towards the crumbling steps and the unwelcoming door they precede. 

“Sameen Shaw?” an easy, unhurried voice calls out.

The woman on the steps stands up. “I knocked.”

The approaching figure resolves into a rather tall, oddly arrayed woman. The oddness stems not so much from her clothing - a woman in trousers isn’t something that turns heads much anymore - but from the bizarre apparatus she carries slung over her shoulders and hanging down against her hips; incoherent masses of delicate metal spindles with small glass orbs attached to their ends. The woman arrives in front of Shaw and stands with a sort of affected nonchalance that dares one to ask about the odd bedeckment. Shaw says nothing.

“Sorry about the wait,” The woman says, moving past Shaw after a moment and ascending the deteriorating steps, rummaging around in her pockets. “My butlers keep quitting. They think the place is haunted. Very silly,” she adds with a roll of her eyes at Shaw, who’s moved up to stand beside her on the steps. “Everywhere is haunted.” She finally produces a small key from a pocket, and uses it to unlock the heavy door. Shaw follows her in, dragging her suitcases behind her.

Gloomy and cavernous, the house seems to lean closely inward nonetheless. Several mounted lanterns mounted along the dark wood walls of the foyer push the shadows in closer. The large space appears devoid of any furnishings, yet instead of an echo, sound seems muffled, as if being sucked in by the ceiling hidden somewhere in the gloom above. Wide openings on all three sides of the foyer lead further into the house’s dark maw. Beside the one opposite the door, curving up and away into darkness, extends a monstrous staircase.

“Hope you don’t mind the dark,” Root says lightly. “No electricity this far out.” She drops her gear onto the floor of the foyer, not particularly gently, with a muffled clatter. She reaches out to take one of the cases from Shaw, who for a moment clenches her hand around the handle before remembering she needs to stay on this woman’s good side, and she releases it. The case doesn’t contain anything of particular import; Shaw simply dislikes having her things touched by other people. She follows Root up the staircase, which describes a ninety degree arc before arriving at a landing, lit only by candles lining the bannister that overlooks the foyer below. Across the landing, and up another curving staircase, out onto another landing, and from there down an obliquely-oriented hallway, flickering torches casting small spheres of light at irregular intervals.

“This is you,” Root says, turning her head to flash a smile, opening a door that distinguishes itself in no way from the half dozen others that they had already passed. 

“Thanks,” Shaw says, expecting her tone will adequately convey the lack of sincerity in the statement. She may have misjudged, however, as her host does not lose her obnoxious smile as she returns Shaw’s case to her hands, and turns to leave. 

Shaw drops her cases to the floor beside the bed, and crosses the small room to close and lock the door, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath her feet as she walks. It’s not that she doesn’t trust Root. Well, _it_ is that she doesn’t trust Root. But it’s not about Root in particular. She doesn’t trust anyone. 

Still, had there been any options for housing other than this madwoman, she surely would have taken them. In retrospect, the woman’s offers seem almost unbelievable. Permanent housing, no payment required, there’s even a room already set up for you! Shaw has a tendency to ignore any warning signs ahead of her, instead kicking them down and walking over them. She’s aware of the problem. She hasn’t done anything about it.

There are strange sounds in the house at night. Some seem to be the house itself. Creaks and groans of wood grown tired of its duty. The wind and the animals outside the labyrinthine house make a noise as well. Blusters and bats. Sounds to set the night on edge.

Others have less obvious origins. Rhythmic thumping. A low, intermittent hum. Possibly a voice. In her bed, Shaw pulls a pillow over her ears, and imagines that each sound which manages to penetrate this shield is in fact her fists connecting with a particular face. In this way, she lulls herself to sleep, while the house and its owner play out their stilted symphony.

***

Root is not in evidence the following morning. Upon emerging from her quarters, Shaw spent nearly half an hour wandering through cramped hallways lined with hundred-year-old portraits and up and down spiral and non-spiral staircases before she managed to emerge out into the foyer of the house. A beast unwilling to easily relinquish its new prey. Or possibly simply designed by someone with no sense of direction and far too much money. 

This part of the house looks different in the day, with the sunlight seeping in slowly through sparsely placed windows, casting light on dusty wooden surfaces. Less foreboding, more forlorn. A china cabinet against one wall, which looks as if it hasn’t been touched in years. A formal dining room, directly adjacent to the foyer, with a massive table surrounded by two dozen chairs. Only one small corner of the table escapes the accumulated layer of dust that covers all else. Further exploration reveals a large sitting room, filled with sofas and chairs, a fireplace against one wall. Shaw tentatively sits down on one of the couches, which releases a musty cloud that sends her into a coughing fit.

The place barely feels as if it’s inhabited. 

Several knocks sound against the front door. Although somewhat tentative, as if the knocker is unsure what the noise might wake, they echo around inside the hollow front chambers of the house. Shaw extricates herself from the couch gently, so as not to redisturb the recently settled dust. When she opens the door, she finds resting on the front step a small crate, containing eggs and two bottles of milk. Their deliver is a young man who has already descended the steps, and now looks back nervously at the house, while continuing his slow creep towards the road. Seeing Shaw, he stops and turns around, looking surprised. 

After enduring several painful moments of blank staring, Shaw asks, “You just going to stand there?”

“Sorry,” he says, snapping out of his stupor, and walking back towards the house, although he doesn’t ascend beyond the first step. “Are you the doctor?”

“Yeah.” She picks up the crate. “You looking for Root?”

“No!” He says, stepping back from the step and teetering wildly for a few moments before his feet find the ground again. “No, sorry. I’ve got to go.” He starts to leave, then turns around again. “How do I find you? If I’m sick.”

“Are you sick?” He shakes his head. “I live here,” Shaw gestures reluctantly at the sprawling building behind here. “Come here. Or send a telegram.”

He sends a few more uncertain glances towards the shadows of the house, as if expecting a tall, dark haired woman to emerge, and then he continues down the road. 

She knows that Root is frustrating. Aggressively flirtatious. Potentially mentally unstable. It had never occurred to her that she actually ought to fear the woman, though. Then again, she’s skinny and doesn’t look like much of a fighter, and Shaw’s never without her pistol. Whatever strikes fear into the local denizens, she feels it poses no threat to her.

Dairy in hand, Shaw returns to the dusty interior. She hasn’t come across the cellar yet, but surely a house like this has an ice box somewhere. Minutes threaten to become hours as Shaw’s quest takes her deeper into the bowels of the house, down tight dark hallways that twist strangely and branch off at odd angles. She passes through rooms; one with a musty piano and a far less musty cello, one with a startlingly high, open ceiling that disappears into shadow, one that is not only rounded, but apparently spherical, the floor dipping from all around the walls. Frustrated, and having nearly lost her burden in the last room, Shaw decides to abandon her search and just cook all the eggs. The next hallway she takes deposits her into the sitting room she’d visited previously. 

Through what can perhaps only be described as divine intervention, glass bottles and eggshells remain unbroken by fits of rage as Shaw makes her way to the kitchen, a room she had spied earlier just off the dining room. Pans, china, glassware, and spices are to be found in reasonable representation there. Root doesn’t look like she eats much, but she must eat _something_ , although truthfully Shaw had begun to wonder. She’s not even sure Root’s in the house at all, she realizes suddenly. She’s traversed what she estimates to be a sizable portion of the monstrous estate, but hasn’t come across anything that resembles the woman’s personal lodgings, though it is perhaps beyond Shaw or indeed any human being to detect such a thing.

Bearing a plate full of freshly prepared eggs and a glass of milk, Shaw seats herself at what she presumes to be Root’s spot at the large dining table. Were anyone to ask for her reasoning, she would say that she doesn’t want to waste time wiping the dust away from any of the other sections. In truth, however, she chooses it almost exclusively because she imagines doing so will annoy Root. This is perhaps not the wisest move for a woman whose needs for lodging has not disappeared, and whose continued presence is ostensibly achieved by not upsetting her host. All this without even mentioning the effect that even the implication of Root has on other residents of the village. Shaw is ignorant of none of these things. They do not sway her. 

The yellow of the morning sun vanishes, as heavy curtains are drawn across the house’s windows. The interior is plunged momentarily into gloom, before candles flare to life of their own accord, giving the room an eerie, shadowed cast.

“Smells good.” 

Root pulls out a chair next to Shaw and sits down, apparently unmindful of the accumulated dust.

“I couldn’t find the icebox.” Shaw says. 

“It’s in the cellar.” Root replies, spearing part of an egg from Shaw’s plate with a fork Shaw hadn’t been aware she was holding.

“Couldn’t find the cellar either.” Shaw slides her plate further away.

“I can show you around later,” Root kicks her feet out in front of her and leans back in the chair. “Unless you’re busy.”

“I’m going into town.” The statement has an air of finality, an indication that the interaction has come to an end. She’s ended every sentence in the conversation this way. On broader scale, she considers that she may have spoken every sentence in her entire life this way. Root seems oblivious, and by way of punctuation, Shaw stands.

“Let me get that for you,” Root says, standing as well and reaching for Shaw’s now-empty plate. Her voice has an odd lilt to it, as though she’d just made a joke, but the succeeding moments take none of the opacity from her words. “Making house calls already?” Root asks from over her shoulder, as she takes Shaw’s dishes to the sink in the kitchen. 

“People like to know who their doctor is beforehand.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting to know you, too.”

This isn’t a question, so Shaw feels no need to reply. 

“You can take the carriage if you want,” Root’s voice wends its way around shadowed corners and through echoing rooms to reach Shaw at the front door. “Just make sure you’re back by evening.”

“You going somewhere?”

“House calls.” Root’s voice approximates a verbal wink. Shaw inhales a deep breath, lets it go, and exits the house without any further questions.

Around the side of the estate, where the trees encroach closer to the walls, believing themselves unnoticed, a stable is tucked away. The house’s irregular shape and strange protrusions, combined with the play of shadows from the trees and walls make it a simple matter to avoid noticing the stable at all. Nearby, the carriage rests beneath an awkwardly constructed overhang that extends out from a concave corner of the house and is supported by the roof on two sides and against the ground by a single large wooden plank. Shaw elects to forgo the hassle of the carriage, saddling and mounting the horse. She’s always been partial to horses, and animals in general. They never try to talk to her.

The journey into town is quiet.


	2. Chapter 2

A miracle is never enough. Though it may be what they had dreamed and hoped and prayed for, upon its arrival they feel inclined to make further demands of it. For if one miracle is possible, why not another? By entering the realm of reality, a miracle becomes real, and therefore mundane. Disappointing. New dreams are dreamt, hopes hoped, and prayers prayed, and the true miracle remains out of reach. Its absence made all the more bitter by its unwelcome cousin. If Shaw can mend a broken bone simply by closing her eyes and focusing, why then can she not take away the pain? A broken limb healed thus seems almost an insult to the one so treated.

It is for this reason that Shaw calls herself a doctor. Not a healer, or a shaman, or whatever others of her sparse kind may dub themselves, but a doctor. No one expects miracles from doctors. 

While out chopping wood, for fires against the approaching winter, he had taken a fall down a scree and broken his left leg. Having set it, and once his exclamation of pain dies down, Shaw stands. His house is small, bricked on the outside, his and his wife’s bedroom one of the only rooms separated from the main chamber, which serves as a kitchen, dining room, and living space. He’s lying on his bed now, his wife looking over him with concern, but no longer any fear. She had half carried him back to the house herself. “Thank you,” she says. “At first, I thought…. Well, I suppose you can’t judge someone by who they live with, can you?” The two children of the family, from appearance somewhere between birth and adulthood, hug Shaw. She doesn’t know what to do with that, so she pushes them away, nods to the family, and leaves the home. She’d used enough of her ability to set the leg properly and put it on a path to healing, but not enough to be obvious, or to heal it entirely. That brings questions, and expectations.

Twilight is unfurling itself across the earth by the time Shaw returns to the looming estate, each passing second lengthening its shadows and darkening its corners. Orange light flickers through one of the windows.

Shaw enters the foyer, attempting to construct in her mind the path that will lead her through the labyrinth to her bed, having every intention of ignoring the surreptitious firelight creeping out through one of the doorways.

“Not even going to say hello?” Root’s voice drifts sinuously out into the foyer.

For a moment, Shaw contemplates simply walking past. She uses another to contemplate violence. Cheered by her thoughts, she follows the path Root’s voice had taken back to the sitting room she had discovered earlier. The fireplace is lit and crackling, casting light across the chairs and couches in the room, stretching out their shadows long against the floor and walls behind. Curled under a blanket at the end of a couch, Root watches Shaw, half her face lit by the fire, half hiding in darkness. It is unclear what Root had been doing in the room prior to Shaw’s arrival. She doesn’t look as if she had just woken from sleep. No book or newspaper lies near her. Indiscernible intuition gives Shaw the distinct impression that the woman had been doing nothing but sitting, and waiting for Shaw to return.

“You can sit down.” The roll of Root’s eyes can be heard in her voice.

Shaw moves towards one of the chairs near the fire, at least half the room between her and Root. She sits down on it, distrustful, remembering the dusty exhalation of her last attempt. To her surprise, the experience is not repeated. The chair looks pristine, at least as far as can be determined by the light of the fire. 

“You cleaned.” Shaw says. Her tone places the statement somewhere between a declaration and an accusation.

“Well, I want to make a good impression.” Root opens her mouth in a yawn, and stretches her legs out on her couch. They’re very long. On some level Shaw views this as an implicit mockery of her own stature, even while recognizing the absurdity of the notion. “Are you cold?” Root asks.

“It was cool outside.”

Root shrugs. “It’s warm over here.”

“The fire’s fine.”

For a few moments, there are no words. Silence, however, proves to be anathema to Root, and she is unwilling to concede any battle to it. “You know,” she says. “Since we’re living here together, we might as well get to know each other.”

“I think this house is big enough that we don’t ever even need to see each other.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be very fun, would it?”

Annoyed, Shaw turns to her. “Is this fun?”

Root eyes flicker and dance oddly. “It could be.”

Discovering her capacity to heal required, at least in young Shaw’s mind, extensive testing to determine the exact bounds of the ability. Cuts and scrapes were her early patients, but she soon moved past them to more challenging injuries. She had broken many bones in the course of her experiments. She considered none of them as painful as this conversation. “Don’t you have somewhere to go tonight?”

Root sighs. “No ghosts tonight.”

Shaw frowns. “Didn’t you say everywhere was haunted?”

Appearing pleased that Shaw had remembered what she said, Root replies, “Everywhere _is_ haunted. Just not everywhen. That would get crowded.”

“Okay.” Shaw says, standing up and walking out of the room. 

She ascends the staircase in the foyer, one hand on the rail in the darkness. Dimly lit by low candlelight, she expects the wood paneled hallway she walks down to end in a left turn, but instead finds only more wall, and is forced to take a right. Hallways lead to more hallways. One has a set of ascending steps, followed immediately by a descending set. None of the walls have any doors, as far as she can tell by what little light there is. Her path leads into a small, octagonal chamber, from which seven other hallways extend. She chooses one at random, which almost immediately begins to cant sharply to the right in a way that surely would collide with one of the others. She stops moving, breathing heavily. Angry, rather than afraid. Root may frighten everyone else, but here Shaw finds nothing worthy of fear. There’s no malevolence present, just childish petulance.

Shaw turns to the wall and begin to kick the wooden panels. Oak groans in response. Within a few moments, cracks have sounded in the low light and appeared on the wood. Another sound, like a sigh, comes from further down the hallway. Shaw turns, and sees a door, looking as reluctant as a door is capable of looking. Within lie Shaw’s cramped quarters, exactly as she had left them, seeming no worse for having apparently moved halfway across the house. 

She ignores the sounds of night until sleep takes her.

***

The cracked boards in the wall remain the next morning, as Shaw emerges from her room into the sparse morning light creeping through the house. Nailed to the wall above her oaken victims is a piece of paper, decorated with a fanciful caricature of a plank of wood with tears running down its face. 

The staircase and the open foyer it leads into are visible from her door, just a few yards away. Wounding the labyrinth earns concessions. 

The house’s owner is yet again absent. Perhaps Shaw can find a way to manufacture daylight and keep the woman deep in the bowels of the building in perpetuity.

She has acquired an office, of sorts, in town. Formerly part of the general store, now closed off from it only by thin wooden walls, it is in fact very little more than a corner with a desk and a chair. But it works. She is rarely there, and it serves primarily as a place for residents unwilling to approach the monstrous house to request Shaw’s attentions, by way of a number of letters slid under the door. One stands out from the others.

Dr. Shaw,

Please pass on my regards to Mrs. Root, and inform her that her presence is requested at her earliest convenience.

A name and address are listed, but they mean nothing to Shaw. She can’t imagine what need someone could have for Root. Or who would try to reach her, while apparently still fearing her too much to contact her directly. Powers beyond the normal always bring either resentment or fear. Often both. Shaw also considers that the letter-writer may simply want to avoid the ordeal of a conversation with the woman, which she considers to be a much more respectable motivation.

Shaw throws the letter in the trash. She has no interest in being a secretary for the madwoman.

***

She eats dinner alone in the dining room by lamplight. There is no more dust on the table. Cold air broods outside, slipping through doors and glass wherever it can. There is about the house a feeling, not entirely detectable by the traditional senses, but undeniably present nonetheless, of emptiness. Something here is missing, the mocking wind calls. Then again, a rational mind might posit that the feeling is natural, in a gigantic house with virtually nothing in it. 

Is Shaw’s a rational mind?

The ceiling overhead begins to creak violently. Shaw glances out through the window towards the faint impression of trees lit against the nightdark sky by the failing moon, searching for evidence of the wind which must surely be beating against the roof of the house. There is none. And even were there, based on the shape of the house from outside, there are more rooms directly overhead, not roof. They would not ferry the wind’s message. Can there be someone else in the house? Root is not here, Shaw is certain of this for reasons she would not be able to describe. No one else will set foot inside. Her worn pistol rests just inside her right boot, as always, and she reaches for its familiar grip.

A crack like thunder rolls through the house, vibrations causing the chandelier above to shake and the glass within to clatter against metal. A sonorous hum fills the air, an enormous bass note that can be felt in the bones, in the soul. 

The lamplight throughout the house has been dimming. The lamp on the table gives one last flicker of resistance before succumbing to darkness. All around, candlewicks follow suit as the air closes in. The house feels smaller now. Tighter. Oppressive in its closeness, its boundaries crush inwards in a claustrophobic rush. The air is so heavy Shaw cannot move. She can’t pull air into her lungs.

The sensation is gone as the house explodes outwards. The candles and torches and lamps flare to life. The door is a mile away. Shaw floats in the center of a universe rushing away from her, every flame a star in the galaxy she sits in the center of. She could move now, but it would be an eternity before the electrical impulses from her brain reached her limbs. She is a god, and she can do nothing.

Shaw is sitting at the dining table, pistol in hand, breathing heavily. The house is gloomy and empty and dimly lit and within the boundaries of human comprehension. She takes what is left of her food and tosses it outside. She can’t remember the last time she didn’t have an appetite. Suspicious, she makes cautious progress back into the house, through the foyer, up the staircase, expecting a trap to spring. But her room is waiting for her dutifully where she had left it that morning, and no sign of the passage of chaos mars its features.

She is not aware of going to sleep, but her mind is abruptly thrust back into to the present by knocks on her door.

“Sameen?” The voice on the other side of the door calls. 

Shaw considers not opening it. She then decides the more personally gratifying course of action would be to open the door and then slam it in Root’s face. This plan is interrupted when Root, who had apparently been resting nearly her entire weight against the door, tumbles inward. Shaw catches her largely limp form and guides her onto the bed. There are cuts on her face and arms, some deep and slowly oozing blood. There are scorch marks along her torso and legs, which may or may not reach through to the skin. Her hair is tousled as though she’d battled a tornado and her breathing is ragged.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Reminiscing,” Root says, in what appears to be her best approximation of an airy tone. “You know how it goes.”

“I don’t know why I bother asking you things.” She checks one of the burns beneath Root’s shirt; the skin is red and welted. “I need to put something on this.”

“Sameen,” Root’s hand darts out like a confused mosquito and manages to grab Shaw’s arm. “There’s no need to pretend with me. And I’d really prefer not to endure weeks of this.”

Shaw frowns, then reaches for Root’s arm, and closes her eyes. Root gasps as her cuts begin to painfully seal themselves. When she’s finished, Shaw feels lightheaded, and turns around to sit down on the bed. She also sits on Root’s leg which was in the way, and feels no sympathy.

“I’m not sure if these burns are healed,” Root says, gesturing to the scorch marks scattered across her trousers. “You should probably check.”

Ignoring this, Shaw asks, “How did you know?” 

“You told me,” Root replies, observing her healed but still bloody arms.

“What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t tell you anything.”

“Not yet,” Root says. “But you will.”

“Great.” Shaw casts her gaze up to the low ceiling. “So you can see the future now?”

“No,” Root says absently. “But sometimes I remember it.”

Shaw shakes her head. “I’m going to sleep on the couch.”

“Sweetie, I can get up,” Root starts to lift herself out of the bed, and Shaw firmly pushes her back down.

“Healing takes energy. Most of that comes from you. If you give yourself a heart attack walking downstairs I just wasted a lot of effort.” She levers herself up and walks to the door. “There was a letter for you.” She says, turning back.

“Oh?” Root looks at her expectantly.

“I forgot to bring it back,” Shaw lies with minimal effort. “I’ll get it tomorrow.”

“Was there anything interesting in it?”

“You think I read your letter?” Shaw asks with mild incredulity.

Root smiles. “I don’t mind. I don’t have any secrets from you.”

This lie is so absurd Shaw laughs out loud. “Someone wanting ‘Mrs. Root’ to come visit them, that’s all it said.”

“Sounds important.”

Shaw shrugs, and moves to close the door.

“I’m not married, you know.” Root calls from the bed. “If you were curious.”

The door snaps shut.


	3. Chapter 3

“What do you think a person is, Sameen?” The fire flickers before them but does not cast its light far. If the room has boundaries they are lost in the gloom. Half-lit by the faint light and seated as straight as a pillar Root gazes into the fire as if hoping to liberate from its blaze an answer which in the absence of that piercing regard is held in thrall. Unperturbed the fire’s blithe dance continues. Not everything yields to those eyes.

Beside Root, Shaw shifts. No warmth seems to emit from the fire. “Half meat and half ego.” She glances across the couch at her host’s profile. “Roughly. Balance is different for some people.”

Root shrugs and smiles over to Shaw. “A little megalomania never hurt anyone.”

“History would argue with that.”

“History and I aren’t well-acquainted.”

Frigid winds shriek faintly as they beat against the house which unleashes a barrage of creaks and groans in response. “Talking to you is painful sometimes.” Shaw says.

“I know you like that kind of thing.”

“Pain, not talking. They cancel each other out.” Frozen miles above pellets of solid water barrage the surface of the Earth and the roofs of houses arrayed upon it. Bringing no heat and casting only its mocking glow the fire seems itself a masquerader better suited to the company of that icy rain without. 

“That doesn’t make any sense, Sameen,” Root seems unperturbed by the cold. Or anything.

“You never make any sense, why do I have to?” Were there a comprehensive list of the things she didn’t have to do, this conversation, sitting in this room, would be somewhere there inscribed. Yet she remains. A paucity of other worthwhile endeavors in which to invest herself, perhaps.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” The gaze that induces horror in any human within a radius miles wide fixes itself now on Shaw, who has never known fear and stares back a stalwart challenge until Root looks away. 

“I’d like to stop freezing.” Shaw says.

Root gestures to the space between them. “It’s warmer over here.”

“Stop trying that. Can’t we just stoke up the fire?”

“It wouldn’t help.” Root replies. “It’s broken.”

“The fire.” Shaw says flatly. “Is broken.”

“Well, it was an accident,” In opposition to her earlier rectitude Root settles back into a comfortable position. “It keeps the house warm during the day, though.”

“I’ve never even seen it lit during the day.” Root is another thing she rarely sees during daylight hours.

“Of course not. That would be silly.”

There are limits that while unknown to modern science dictate what volume of absurdity the human mind can endure before succumbing to inner violent urges. Shaw, a dam in a stream that seeks reach over the top, stands up before the flood. As she moves into the gloom of the house beyond the pitiful reach of impotent firelight Root speaks. 

“I thought we could go into town together tomorrow. I need to make a visit.”

“I’m going in the morning.” 

“I’ll see you then, then.” 

Shaw’s room waits for her, maintaining its position just off the first hallway past the foyer’s staircase. Within, it is similar, but not unchanged. The space has grown larger, steadily over several days. Recently a closet had materialized where previously had been only wall. In the day, sunlight shines directly through the room’s window regardless of the apparently position of the sun. 

From somewhere within the bowels of the house, some sort of music plays. To faint to be resolved into distinct melodies or timbres it nonetheless gives the night a pleasant cast and sleep is found without effort.

***

Frozen in the frigid air of the night before and indifferent to the sun now overhead the grass and ground underfoot crackle and crunch as Shaw readies the horse and carriage. Root emerges from the house and descends the front steps with her apparatus slung over one shoulder. Shaw frowns slightly on seeing the woman in the full light of day. She climbs into the carriage and takes Root’s apparatus and lays it on the floor of the carriage just ahead of where their feet will rest. She sits, looks over, sees Root still on the ground with an arm outstretched expectantly, stands up, and hauls her up into the carriage.

“So you’re not a vampire.” Shaw says as they begin to move away from the house down the dirt path towards town. 

“Should I be?” Root asks. “You can just ask if you want me to bite you.”

“I’ve never seen you out in the sun.”

“I have delicate skin.”

Exhaled breath is visible in the chill. The carriage trundles down the path at a sedate pace. 

“Where should I let you off?” Shaw asks.

“I thought I’d follow you for a while,” Root says. “I’d like to see you work.”

“People around here don’t seem to like you.”

“They’re scared of me, that’s not the same thing. They’re friendly enough when they realize they need me.”

“It’s going to be hard to work if you’re giving everyone I visit heart attacks.”

“I’ll behave myself, I promise,” Root lays a mocking hand on her heart. She leans over and says in a theatrical whisper, “Unless you don’t want me to.”

Without particular gentleness Shaw reaches over and shoves Root back onto her half of the carriage. Root appears surprised but not bothered and spends the rest of the trip looking thoughtfully at Shaw whose face could have been carved in stone for all the movement it betrays.

Like a specter of death personified in long legs and dark hair Root’s presence at the first house Shaw visits is met with shocked looks and subsequently studious attempts not to look at all. Root trails Shaw to the bedside of the ailing woman while family members maintain a sizable distance from her while also pretending she doesn’t exist. Shaw does what she can, appearing to do only what can be expected of a doctor, while Root hovers just over her shoulder.

“Move.” She says without turning around. “You’re in my light.”

The faces arrayed around the bedside react with horrified expressions, and further shock when Root obeys immediately.

The rest of the visits proceed similarly, with Root playing the apparently studious assistant for some esoteric reason beyond the reach of any human mind and certainly beyond the curiosity of Shaw’s.

Upset by the day’s resistance to its gaze the sun now hides its face behind grey clouds. It’s barely past noon but the air feels no warmer than it had in the morning. “Do you want to come with me?” Root asks after departing the final house on Shaw’s schedule for the day. Her mysterious errand still awaits.

“I’m not walking back to the house.” Shaw replies.

Hidden from view until moments before their arrival the house sits amid a large swath of evergreen trees. Nothing approaching Root’s cavernous abode, it is still a home of respectable size, with two stories and a chimney presently emitting smoke. Root stands and jumps lithely from the carriage and looks up at Shaw, who passes her apparatus down. Root then offers a hand to help Shaw descend, which she ignores. 

From the front door comes the woman Shaw assumes had written the letter. “T-thank you for coming,” she says nervously, glancing quickly at Root and then away.

“Where is it?” Root asks.

“The, um, the bedroom, usually,” the woman replies. “Sometimes it moves.”

Root nods and walks into the house. Shaw follows. A couch in the living area has pillows and blankets strewn across it. In the bedroom, Root rocks her weight from one leg to another, holding her hands out in front of her and feeling through the air as if she were blind.

“What are you doing?” Shaw asks.

“Does it feel colder here to you?”

Shaw steps forward and detects a noticeable change of temperature in the air. “What is that?”

“A good place to start.” Root lays her apparatus down onto the floor. Metal spindles connected to small glass orbs of various sizes all connected to some sort of cable. Root detaches one from the cable, and holds it aloft, waving it slowly through the air, moving around the cold spot. She finds a location that satisfies her, and releases the spindle, where it remains, hanging in the air with the orb sticking out at an oblique angle roughly at eye-height. Root hums a note, and then gently strikes the floating spindle which begins to resonate with its own frequency. She makes several small adjustments to its position, the spindle and orb not resisting her but otherwise remaining suspended in the air, until the singing metal rod matches her hummed note. The orb glows faintly.

She detaches another spindle, and begins the process again, setting this one eventually at another angle and another note. In this manner she places seven spindles arrayed around the first in an uneven perimeter. The orbs flash brightly in different colors, the spindles sing an eerie harmony.

“You should stand back for this,” Root warns. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Shaw moves to the doorway of the bedroom, understanding nothing of what has taken place. Root moves to the central spindle and places a hand on its orb.

The metallic harmony becomes deafening, and then passes beyond hearing to feeling. The sustained chord vibrates in Shaw’s bones. The orbs flare so bright she closes her eyes and still flinches away. For a moment that cannot be measured time ceases to exist. Shaw sees the smiling face of her father. She sees the face of her daughter. She remember waking up yesterday and waking up tomorrow. 

The lights and noise vanish abruptly, except for a scattering of clattering collisions. Shaw opens her eyes and sees the orb-spindles laid across the floor, no longer supported in the air. Root sits on the floor, knees pulled up to her chest and arms wound tightly around them.

“Are you hurt?” Shaw steps over the spindles and crouches down next to her. The air here is no longer any colder than anywhere else.

Root sniffs and shakes her head, face hidden behind her knees and a curtain of hair. “I’m all right.”

Unsure of what to do, Shaw remains crouched there while Root sobs quietly. After several minutes, her arms loosen their death grip and she pushes her hair back and smiles at Shaw with red-rimmed eyes. “Shall we go?”

She stands, and begins to reattach the orb-spindles to their cable, and slings the apparatus over her shoulders again. She stumbles as they exit the house, and Shaw takes hold of one arm to keep her upright.

Perhaps believing her home was just witness to the entire host of hell the woman outside casts an apprehensive look at Root who tries to move with an authoritative air even while being half-carried by Shaw. “All done,” she says lightly.

***

Shivering violently and receiving no aid from the traitorous fire in the sitting room Root sits huddled beneath blankets on the floor in front of the wood stove Shaw had lit and stoked. Though night has already fallen the kitchen is brighter than the arrayed lamps can account for. Shaw sits beside Root on the floor, watching the slab of meat she had placed in the oven, having not wanted to waste a perfectly good fire.

“What the hell was that?” Shaw asks eventually. She had posed the question several times on their journey back to the house and has yet to receive a satisfactory answer.

“Ghosts,” Root says. “Some aren’t friendly.”

“So is it gone now?”

“Nothing is ever gone,” Root shifts under her blankets. “But it won’t bother anyone else anymore.”

“How long can you do this without ending up killing yourself?”

“Are you worried about me?”

“I’m a doctor. It’s my job to keep people from dying.”

Root closes her eyes. “You’re beautiful, Sameen.”

Shaw snorts. “Yeah, I’ve noticed you staring.”

“That too,” Root smiles. “But that’s not what I meant.”

Shaw has no response to this. The fire’s warmth washes over them.


	4. Chapter 4

There are furtive depths to the house that Root has not yet plumbed. Darkened corners, holding promises still unfulfilled. Moments, out of reach. Root is not the house and the house is not Root but neither are they separate, and as the house presents mysteries to her so is she a mystery to herself. There are _pieces_ of her beyond her reach.

When she was younger or older or in between she had raged against the inequity of time. She knew and will know and knows by way of arcane resources available to her that time and space are not separate but bound together, like bands of iron heated and pounded together until they cease to be pieces and become a whole. One does not lament, when walking down a forest path, the permanent loss of the trees and flowers passed earlier, as if by the single act of passage they become inaccessible. Time is the same. Time does not move and it does not flow, time does not begin and it does not end, it is simply there, all the time that will ever exist crystallized in perfect infinite eternity. In a cruel injustice, however, all life is bound to traverse time in only one direction at only one rate. What is done is done and can ever be undone or redone. Childhood friends beneath six feet of dirt will never laugh again. For this inequity she sought, demanded, recompense. To adjust the terms of the agreement life makes with time.

Her will is implacable, but this alone is not enough. The rent she blithely tore in everything tore her as well. She is lost across time. She cannot escape the consequences of her act, and nor can she escape the act itself. An event, not localized in time, but spanning across all time. A whirlpool, that although on occasion her desperate strokes draw her away from, eventually pulls her back in. She searches for herself, she finds herself, she loses herself. For her arrogance time exacts a cruel revenge.

She is not directly aware of any of this. Her moment of transgression is the epicenter of her dissolution, a time-independent event shattered beyond her ability to recapture. She knows that she is lost, and she searches for herself.

There are ghosts everywhere. Ghosts of her. Echoes of her past and her future.

***

“I can’t keep doing this forever.” Aggrieved skin returns to its normal pallor as burns disappear. Shaw leaves her hand on Root’s leg for a moment longer before she pulls it away, sitting back and tilting her head to look towards the distant crepuscular sky beyond the thin bare branches of trees. 

“Why not?” Root remains laying on the ground, long limbs languid despite the rocks and leaves and broken branches beneath them.

Shaw pauses for a moment. “All right,” she says, “I don’t _want_ to keep doing this forever.”

“Too bad.” Root lifts her formerly burned leg into the air and inspects it. “I thought it was nice.”

The collection of delicate orbs and metal spindles lay scattered around them among the bases of thin trees and fallen leaves. One of the glass orbs is half shattered and blackened around the failure line. Bursts of cold whistle and whip through the air. 

“You can put your trousers back on.” Shaw says.

Root pulls her head up and glances to the forlorn garment, pockmarked with holes scorched around the edges, lying beside her. “I don’t think burnt is in fashion right now.”

“Is that?” Shaw jerks her head in the general direction of Root’s bare legs.

“You don’t think so?”

“I think your skinny legs are going to freeze out here.”

Root lifts an arm and looks towards Shaw, and holds the position, blinking expectantly until Shaw sighs, rises to her feet, takes Root’s arm, and pulls her up from the ground. Seemingly satisfied, Root runs her hands through her hair to dislodge bits of leaves and dirt, slings her ruined trousers over one shoulder, and begins to collect her assortment of spindles and orbs. 

Shaw had not taken especial notice of their route on the way out, but she does not hesitate in setting their homeward direction. The house has a gravity to it, as though, if she stood completely still, she would slowly fall in towards it. Night pulls its cloak over the world, and stars begin to peer out from the expanse. Lights flicker in windows across the face of the house when they reach it. Shaw did not light any of them before they left earlier in the day.

Shaw ascends the front steps and pulls open the heavy door, holding it open mockingly for Root. Root mocks her in return by appearing sincerely grateful for the gesture.

The blaze in the sitting room’s fireplace emits flickering light and radiates warmth across the room. Root curls up beneath a heavy blanket on one of the couches and rests her head on Shaw’s shoulder.

“Fire’s not broken anymore.” Shaw remarks.

Root fiddles with a stray thread on her blanket and with a sharp motion snaps it off. “Sometimes you can put the pieces back together. Or I might not have broken it yet. It’s hard to tell.”

In the quiet sounds of the night and the house and in the cold of the world and in the heat of the room Shaw’s leaden eyelids begin to pull closed. She could go to her room, which in recent days has not hidden itself from her or made entry difficult. But she’s here, and here is warm and comfortable.

***

There is something missing. Root knows this. She’d found a locked door in the bowels of the house. She shifted the walls and the floors in an attempt to gain entry. She looked for times when the door had been open or will be open. In anger she’d even tried to dissolve the door and thence the room beyond but had been unsuccessful.

She’d been feeling more complete lately. Important pieces of herself had been recovered. And an attractive woman has been living in her house, a factor she admits influences her heavily.

But this door nags at her. A piece of her, for that is what it must represent, that she cannot access. She is overcome with the certainty that this piece is the lynchpin. The one that will tell her what she has never doubted she will know; how to end time forever. Forever. Even that word assumes time. She’ll have to make new words. She’ll have all the absence of time in the world. In the universe.

There is no reason why she should believe this door holds the knowledge she seeks. Her belief is absolute nonetheless.

Shaw had gone into town earlier in the day. Root assembles her resonators before the door, suspended in air, making small adjustments to them. This is a complex harmony. 

After a time the chord is right. The orbs flash, but light is a wave as sound is a wave and the chord of light from the orbs and the chord of sound from the spindles resonate together and against each other in decreasing intervals until they form a solid pulse, solid not in a metaphor but in truth a wave becoming a mass as mass begins to dissolve and with it all the subatomic forms that make up all of space and time and until time and space, themselves a Möbius strip appearing to present two illusory sides reveal at last one infinite infinitesimal one dimensional point of everything.

The whirlpool has pulled her in again.

***

The house tilts crazily as Shaw enters. Or perhaps the house has not shifted at all, and she only imagines remembering walking on the floors instead of clambering across the walls. She jumps down into a chasm of a hallway, planning to catch herself on a door frame a few feet down, but instead slam back onto the floor. She looks up, and sees the wood paneling of the hallway walls rushing past her, as if she were riding a galloping horse down the passage. A door whips past and then curves away. She begins to move down the hall, against the flow, unsure if this how houses normally work. Fixing the laws of reality in her mind is strangely difficult.

She reaches a door. It does not look like a door, but she knows that is what it is. It does not look like much of anything, in fact, as looking directly at it presents a challenge to the senses. It could be a door, or maybe it was a door once. It bends strangely, or light bends around it.

It is clear that Root has passed through. Even amidst the confusion of the house, Shaw is not in doubt about this.

She does not know what this is. She does not know what it will do to her to pass through, if passing through is even possible. She doesn’t know if Root has hurt or killed herself somewhere beyond. It is frankly unlikely that she herself would survive if she attempted to traverse it.

It should be noted that Shaw did not think any of these thoughts. She used approximately one second to determine that Root had gone through and followed immediately.

The world she enters does not make sense to her. She cannot move, in part, she discovers, because she does not have a body. She flails wildly in her mind.

She detects a faint sense. Something that is broken, scattered in incomprehensible ways. Injured.

But healing things is what she does. She pulls the disparate, shattered _something_ back together.

***

Panting heavily, Shaw lays on a wooden floor, looking up at a brightly lit ceiling. Light coming in from the front windows, she realizes as she discovers she’s in the foyer. She rolls over and sees Root laid out beside her, and crouches next to her. Root blinks mildly up at her.

“What the fuck was that?” Shaw asks.

Root reaches up to place a hand on Shaw’s shoulder. “Do you remember what happens next?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Root says. “I do.” She pulls her head up to Shaw’s and kisses her.

***

There is a very slow, almost imperceptible drift over days. The pieces that are Root, that she had lost and gathered and lost and gathered begin to separate from her singularity. Shaw pulls them back together again.

“You can’t do this forever, Sameen.” Root says. They’re laying on a long balcony that may or may not have ever appeared on the exterior of the house before, looking up at the stars in the night sky.

Shaw shrugs. “I’m not going anywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the strangest thing I've ever written.


End file.
